MANDEM Featured in “Love Me, Love My Belly”

Published July 24, 2017

Selections from “Hypermobility,” the painting series from MANDEM (the artist conglomerate fronted by FSU Art MFA ’15 Maize Arendsee), are featured on the cover and interior of “Love Me, Love My Belly,” an arts and literature journal from Porkbelly Press.

“Love Me, Love My Belly” is a notable annual print zine dedicated to the acceptance of self and imperfection as beauty, described as being “about the space between us, our differences, our scars, our wobbly bits, and our power as it relates to the bodies we live in,” making it an excellent fit for MANDEM’s work. The “Hypermobility” series uses studio models with genetic connective tissue disorders to capture moments where joints hyperextend or dislocate and the body moves into broken-seeming, impossible configurations. “These images look to find a moment of (self) creation in the embrace of a disabled body. As art objects, though, their larger goal is to reinsert disabled bodies into the often-inaccessible homes of art and mythology and to reassert our agency and right to exist,” MANDEM explains in their artist statement.

Selections from “Hypermobility” have also been featured in Rogue Agent Journal, among other publications. MANDEM’s continued work on this painting series is made possible in part by grants from the Ohio Arts Council.